Rather than blaming Newsweek or the Pentagon, some commentators blamed Muslim protesters for being so upset about the reported mistreatment of the Quran. “From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people,” wrote Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (5/19/05). “But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.”

“The rioters are the real enemy,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times (5/19/05). “After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito.”

Stanley Crouch (New York Daily News, 5/23/05) decried “the sorts of wild Muslims who killed 15 or 16 people during three days of rioting in Afghanistan.”

The problem with these analyses is that the “killers” in the Afghanistan riots were not mainly the Islamist protesters, but the police forces of the U.S.-backed government. While rioters did cause extensive property damage, the fatalities, according to Western news reports, were overwhelmingly the result of police firing into crowds of demonstrators.

Journalists typically condemn attempts to force their colleagues to disclose anonymous sources, saying that subpoenaing reporters will discourage efforts to expose government wrongdoing. But such warnings seem like self-puffery after one watches contemporary journalism in action: When clear evidence of wrongdoing emerges, with no anonymous sources required, major news outlets can still virtually ignore it.

A leaked British government document that first appeared in a London newspaper (Sunday Times, 5/1/05) bluntly stated that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was shaped to support the drive for war. Though the information rocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s re-election campaign when it was exposed, for weeks it received little attention in the U.S. media.

What was dubbed the Downing Street Memo was a record of a July 23, 2002 meeting in Blair’s Downing Street office with the prime minister’s top advisors. The meeting was held to discuss Bush administration policy on Iraq, and the likelihood that Britain would support a U.S. invasion. “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided,” the minutes state.

The document also recounts the findings of Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence service MI6, who had just returned from a visit to Washington: “There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Pasadena residents didn’t get to read about the exploits of local celebrity Dr. Robert Nelson, who, besides being a Jet Propulsion Lab photo analyst who helped present those dramatic photos of Saturn’s rings and moons, also gave the lie to White House claims that the bulge seen on Bush’s back during the presidential debates was “just a wrinkle.”

They didn’t get to read Nelson’s account of how his photo analysis of Bush’s jacket—a story that would have increased speculation that the president was wearing a hearing device during the debates—almost made it into the New York Times before being killed by top editor Bill Keller (Extra!, 1–2/05).

They didn’t read all this in their local daily, the Pasadena Star-News, because senior editors at that paper killed the story on Saturday, April 30, right before publication in the Sunday edition—apparently for political, not journalistic, reasons.

The Star-News is the oldest holding of MediaNews Group, a newspaper and television station chain owned and run by William Dean Singleton, one of the U.S.’s more conservative media moguls. Singleton was singled out by Editor & Publisher (1/26/04) as one of several newspaper chain owners who contributed money to the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign last year. MediaNews Group also owns the Denver Post and the L.A. Daily News.

The U.S. is violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

That view, far from exotic or extreme, was expressed repeatedly by arms control experts and international officials at the month-long NPT review conference held at the U.N. in May. It is embraced by U.S. establishment figures such as former President Jimmy Carter and Kennedy-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

In a Washington Post op-ed (3/28/05), a month before the conference opened, Carter wrote: "While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons."

McNamara was quoted earlier this year (Foreign Policy, 5-6/05) bluntly declaring the U.S. a nuclear outlaw: "I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous."

But it's a view rarely expressed in mainstream news media, the Carter op-ed being a notable exception. Instead of telling the global story of disarmament, journalists seem to take a more nationalistic perspective, often portraying disarmament in terms the White House prefers: the U.S. policing the likes of Iran or North Korea, or squabbling with European officials for being too soft on such "rogue states."

In such one-sided reporting, failure to challenge official misstatements is common, disarmament experts who say the U.S. is in breach of the NPT are ignored and the larger story of NPT division, between nuclear weapon haves and have-nots, is missed.

New improved nukes

Newsweek ran a sensational claim based on an anonymous source who turned out to be completely wrong. While one can’t blame the subsequent violence entirely on this report, it’s fair to say that credulous reporting like this contributed to a climate in which many innocent Muslims died.

The inaccurate Newsweek report appeared in the magazine’s March 17, 2003 issue, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. It read in part:

In the past year and a half, the Bush administration has engaged in elaborate rhetorical gymnastics when addressing the use and authorization of torture by American forces and leaders. Under increasing fire for its conduct of the war in Iraq, the scandal of Abu Ghraib and the alarming implications of defenses such as the August 2002 Bybee memo (which stated that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death”), various administration spokespeople have publicly disavowed torture. At the same time, they have refused to classify as torture even techniques that any reasonable person would find abhorrent (and that the United States, in fact, deems torture when practiced by other countries), suggesting a definition so expansive and loose as to place few limits on interrogators.

Many in the media have followed suit, enabling the administration’s justifications by suggesting or following exceedingly narrow definitions of torture. In fact, some reporters and commentators have even gone beyond the administration, making—implicitly or explicitly—claims that even Bush and his spokespeople would not voice publicly: that torture is sometimes justifiable, that international or traditional sanctions against torture are absurd and that opposition to torture is pitiful and potentially dangerous.

In a week in June when 15 GIs were killed in Iraq (6/13–19/05), the war pictures in the New York Times (6/19/05, 6/20/05) featured dazed Iraqis after a suicide bombing, a Marine patrolling, the twisted remains of a vehicle, wounded children, a civilian casualty in a morgue. No photographs featured American casualties—a typical absence in U.S. coverage of the war.

There are notable exceptions. One of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize photos for breaking news photographs awarded to the Associated Press showed a controversial image of the charred bodies of American contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah.

Most of the other 20 photos in the portfolio on the Pulitzer website are more typical of Iraq War photography, with graphic images of death, grief, humiliation—only when these things involve Iraqis. There is the shooting of an Iraqi election worker, a wounded Iraqi, grieving Iraqis, two pictures of dead Iraqi children, two of Iraqi prisoners.

Images of American loss are generally much less graphic. Two photos show American Marines paying respects to dead but unseen comrades. One picture of a wounded GI is unusual because it shows his bloody arm. Pictures of American casualties usually appear after wounds have been cleaned up and agony is no longer visible.

Picturing Vietnam and Iraq

After eight years in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address on January 17, 1961. The former general warned of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” He added that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media. In the process, firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.

Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant. In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”

On March 19, the two-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands of people across the country, and still more worldwide, turned out to protest the ongoing war. The protests had multiple goals, but given the general numbing of the population to the war, one objective was undoubtedly to keep the fact that human beings are being killed on a daily basis in the forefront of the average American’s brain. Unfortunately, if coverage in leading newspaper and television outlets is any gauge, this goal remains largely unmet.

The New York Times (3/20/05) teased its coverage on the front page and included a photograph on page A1, alongside an article on figure skating. But the actual story was buried on Page 35 of the Metro section. While the headline in the print edition was “Hundreds of Rallies Held Across U.S. to Protest Iraq,” the online headline more accurately conveyed the tone of the article: “Two Years After Iraq Invasion, Protesters Hold Small Rallies.”

In the first paragraph, the protests were characterized as “relatively small.” In the second paragraph, we are told that “thousands joined similar protests in European cities,” but that overall, the protests were “nowhere near as big as those in February 2003.” In the third paragraph, the Times noted that “about 350” people protested in Times Square.

James Weinstein, 1926-2005

"Jim Weinstein was a shining example of a truly independent journalist.... In his own way, he was in the tradition of George Seldes and I.F. Stone and Lincoln Steffens--muckraking journalists who challenged the received wisdom. He always asked 'Why?' and 'Who is behind what?' and 'Where are the bodies buried?' More than ever, we need journalists such as Jim, who insisted that we must think things through, that we must remember the past in order to understand the present and prepare for the future."
--Studs Terkel on In These Times founder James Weinstein (AlterNet, 6/19/05)

A Shining Standard

"The media...stoked the ratings with constant, trivializing coverage while other, far more important stories went under-reported or completely ignored in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and Washington, D.C. The press might respond by saying, 'We gave the people what they wanted.' My response would be, 'My job is to give them what they want. When he steps into a recording studio, it's Michael Jackson's job to give them what they want. Your job is to give the people what they need.'"
--Novelist Steven King on coverage of the Michael Jackson trial (Entertainment Weekly, 6/15/05)

Oh, That Kind of "Balanced"

In Search of Reliable Sources

Thanks to you and all those who work with you both in offices and in the field for the very important watchdog work you do on the media. During a period when the media are manipulated perhaps more than in the entire history of our country, this activity takes on even greater significance. Since accurate and sufficient information is essential to a participatory electorate, a properly functioning democracy depends on people like yourselves. But you knew that.

I am also writing to address a problem that you may be able to help with, although it may involve a reexamination of your mission statement. As a regular reader of Extra! I am regularly faced with frustration, for although you tell me where to find misleading information in the media, what I want to know is how to find more reliable sources. In all of your research, you must run across media that are more reliable and less beholden to special interests. Wouldn't it be a great help to give your readers access to better sources by identifying them and including contact information? In doing so you would be creating a more informed public and, not less important, supporting those media that have journalistic integrity.

Herb Huebsch
San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

Female Sons of Bitches in Short Supply

I have just today received my first issue of Extra! (5=6/05). Obviously I am just as concerned about the very frightening state of the media in this country as you are, else I would not have subscribed. And quite clearly you do take the role of journalism very seriously, as is evidenced by "'The Profit Motive': Laurie Garrett on What's Wrong With Journalism."

Cable news networks have devoted significant time to the case of Natalee Holloway, an Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba. But cable news' most popular host has urged the media to exercise caution.

On June 9, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly explained, "As you may know, we do not speculate here on The Factor. We have no idea what happened to Natalee or why she left the bar with some Aruban men. I've heard some irresponsible media speculate about that, and it makes me angry."

For those who had followed O'Reilly's coverage of the case, this must have been puzzling. If not "speculation," what would O'Reilly call the following statements he has made on his June 6 show about the Holloway case?

Looks like she's dead because the five people, two arrested, three interviewed, are all shady characters....

I think this was a straight abduction scene. OK? Was she probably--she went to a Boyz II Men concert before she went to the bar, where she danced and partied. All right? Then she indeed and everybody saw her leave with a couple of guys. Now after that is when I-- obviously, she got into trouble....

But to me, I mean, a woman like this, 18 years old, we know her background, doesn't have sex with three guys she doesn't know. I mean, that doesn't happen....

***

O'Reilly: And that, unfortunately, leaves me to believe that this poor woman, the chances of her being alive right now are not strong.

Candice DeLong (retired FBI agent): Correct. Even if they weren't drug dealers, I am with you in your assessment of what her situation may be now because if these are the five people that are most likely to have been with her, and they're in custody or being looked at, where is she?

O'Reilly: She's at the bottom of the ocean.

DeLong: That's what's got me worried.

The Downing Street Memo seems like one of the stranger episodes in media history—with major media virtually ignoring dramatic new evidence in a major story, and then inventing peculiar excuses for why they hadn’t covered it.
But in context, media behavior makes perfect sense. When George W. Bush claimed, throughout 2002 and 2003, that he saw war with Iraq as a last resort, journalists knew that was a lie. But as the New York Times Elisabeth Bumiller declared (Extra!, 1–2/05), “You can’t just say the president is lying.”
Not only did they not say what they knew to be the case, but they attacked and derided anyone who suggested that the emperor wasn't fully clothed. When Rep. Mike Thompson (D.-Calif.) expressed doubts about Bush's claims about an Iraq/Al-Qaeda connection, CNN’s Connie Chung (10/7/02) rebuked him: “You mean you don't believe what President Bush just said? . . . It sounds almost as if you’re asking the American public, ‘Believe Saddam Hussein, don’t believe President Bush.’” (See FAIR Action Alert, 10/10/02.)
Of course, after the administration went ahead and invaded Iraq, no evidence of Al-Qaeda ties surfaced, and no proscribed weapons, either. The fiction that Bush didn't want to go to war became even more important, because it was that lie that allowed the other lies to be presented as honest mistakes, intelligence failures or even elaborate hoaxes engineered by Saddam Hussein himself (Extra!, 5–6/04).

The Downing Street Memo seems like one of the stranger episodes in media history—with major media virtually ignoring dramatic new evidence in a major story, and then inventing peculiar excuses for why they hadn’t covered it.
But in context, media behavior makes perfect sense. When George W. Bush claimed, throughout 2002 and 2003, that he saw war with Iraq as a last resort, journalists knew that was a lie. But as the New York Times Elisabeth Bumiller declared (Extra!, 1–2/05), “You can’t just say the president is lying.”
Not only did they not say what they knew to be the case, but they attacked and derided anyone who suggested that the emperor wasn't fully clothed. When Rep. Mike Thompson (D.-Calif.) expressed doubts about Bush's claims about an Iraq/Al-Qaeda connection, CNN’s Connie Chung (10/7/02) rebuked him: “You mean you don't believe what President Bush just said? . . . It sounds almost as if you’re asking the American public, ‘Believe Saddam Hussein, don’t believe President Bush.’” (See FAIR Action Alert, 10/10/02.)
Of course, after the administration went ahead and invaded Iraq, no evidence of Al-Qaeda ties surfaced, and no proscribed weapons, either. The fiction that Bush didn't want to go to war became even more important, because it was that lie that allowed the other lies to be presented as honest mistakes, intelligence failures or even elaborate hoaxes engineered by Saddam Hussein himself (Extra!, 5–6/04).